Word: warriorism
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...ROAD WARRIOR Directed by George Miller...
...VERMIN HAVE INHERITED THE EARTH . So proclaims the spray-painted graffito on a truck sprawled by a desolate stretch of road in this low-budget Australian thriller. At first horrified glance, moviegoers may be convinced that the vermin have also inherited the movie industry. In The Road Warrior, cars crash, somersault, explode, get squashed under the wheels of semis. Skinless bug-eyed corpses hurtle toward the screen. A mangy dog sups at a coyote carcass. A deadly boomerang shears off fingertips, creases a man's skull. That's entertainment? As a series of isolated incidents, no; our nerve...
Like its predecessor Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior is set in the postnuclear future. The world has been totaled; civilization is a white-line junkyard; the only amenity is staying alive. Where there was high culture, now there is only car culture. In one of the film's first images, an automobile breaks angrily through one side of the truck that has been holding it; this is the caesarean birth of the new mutant marauders. They race across the scarred landscape on stripped-down motorcycles, killing for fuel, raping for fun, going to hell at 80 m.p.h...
...counterpart in the marauders is Wez (Vernon Wells), a Feral Kid gone wrong. War-painted and Apache-coiffed, Wez has a mind that performs acrobatics of sadism and a scream that sounds like stripped gears. But Wez is a Muppet compared with his leader, the lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson), "warrior of the wasteland, the ayatullah of rock-and-rollah." The Humungus malevolence courses through his huge pectorals, pulses visibly under his bald, sutured scalp. He is the meanest, strongest man left in the world. But Max is the best...
...Gibson an international star: he is more mature and authoritative; his moon face is cratered with character. In 1979, when Mad Max was released, George Miller was a 34-year-old M.D. who had edited his first feature on a kitchen table. Max surprised with its cinematic canniness, but Warrior astounds as a sequel superior in every respect. Miller suggests violence; he does not exploit it. He throws the viewer off-balance by mixing the ricochet rhythms of his chase scenes with tableaux of Walpurgisnacht grandeur: Wez's rain dance, a fiery crucifixion, a vision of Max flying supine...